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Monday, April 14, 2014

I Was Robbed.

As a HypnoBirthing teacher, many second time moms come to my class after a previous birth experience that was less than satisfactory. That goes with the territory; you try something and it doesn't work, so you opt for something different. Usually it's moms who took a hospital class or no class, and they realize they do want to learn a little something more for this time. I can't speak to the efficacy of other classes, just that these are the couples who come to me.

"I was robbed," she says. "I told them I wanted a natural birth, but the nurse kept asking if I wanted my epidural yet. They wouldn't let me get up, eat, or drink. They said I had to lay back." These moms have either usually fought tooth and nail, battled against their environment through the birth rather than calmly spent the time connecting with the baby within and welcoming their child to the world.

She says, "I was robbed. I had it all planned out. Birth is natural. But then I felt so much pressure on my back and they told me not to move because the monitors needed to stay on and I told them that I just needed to get on my hands and knees like in the birth videos I watched on YouTube. I told them no drugs, but after a while, I just gave in. They kept offering and offering and they wouldn't help me find any other relief. I just wanted to escape."

"I felt so helpless," he says. "I wanted to help her, but I couldn't stand to see her hurting. I begged her to get the epidural. I didn't know what else to do."

"We felt powerless," they say.

My goal, my job, is to empower couples. I want couples who take my classes and workshops to be EMPOWERED. I want to return the power you were born with to it's rightful place WITHIN YOU.

You may feel robbed, but I'm here because I want to return what was lost and help you reclaim all that is yours.

When I began birth work, I started with teaching HypnoBirthing because I wanted to share what I had learned from the class I took, and I wanted to share it with other moms. In the class I took, we were all first time moms, and we approached it with excitement and were ready to learn about what our bodies were meant to do.

As I have grown and changed my practice over the years, I've realized that for second time moms, birth can carry a lot of weight, fear, and baggage from previous experiences. Even for a first time mom who has felt at odds with her body, it's not simply as sharing information. I became certified as a Hypnotists, and trained specifically in working with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) because of the types of moms I was coming into contact with. I wanted to help more moms and I wanted to have the tools to reach moms who felt "robbed" by a previous birth, help dads who had felt completely helpless move forward empowered, and in some cases, help moms overcome a feeling a physical violation from previous births that felt comparable to sexual assault. There's something wrong with maternity care when the term "birth rape" is a fairly well-known term to describe the horrific way some women feel about their birth experience. No one should feel that way about the birth of her child.

How we honor mother, baby, family in our community is important, it's essential, it's everything.